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Barton: Meth addiction puts pressure on families, prisons

I don't know Sandi Speight, who lives on the other side of Georgia in Cedartown, but I'm glad I'm not in her shoes.

But in an indirect way, I am in her shoes.

So is every Georgian who pays taxes, wants to live in a safer community and is concerned about the way the state handles - or mishandles - people who are convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.

Speight sent me a copy of a letter she sent to James Donald. He's the commissioner of the state Department of Corrections, which runs Georgia's prison system.

On Jan. 20, this newspaper published an editorial praising Donald for sounding an alarm about the rise in the number of nonviolent drug offenders he's locking up, especially those hooked on methamphetamine. That's the cheap drug of choice for poor white folks in mostly rural areas here and across the country.

Donald told state lawmakers in Atlanta that the prison system is adding about 250 meth users and dealers to Georgia's inmate population each month. At the current rate, that's 3,000 meth offenders a year - a big number. Indeed, that's three times the number of inmates already in the system on voluntary manslaughter convictions.

The increase in meth offenders is no surprise, given last year's doubling of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation's Meth Task Force. Gov. Sonny Perdue has made a meth crackdown a priority, and for good reason.

And for good reason. Meth (or ice, crank, or tina) is nasty stuff. It turns regular users into walking freak shows, with rotting teeth, scabby sores and hollow eyes that betray a vacant mind underneath. For a visual reference, check out the before-and-after "faces of meth" photos taken by Oregon authorities (www.drugfree.org/Portal/DrugIssue/MethResources/faces/index.html).

But locking people up has created a new problem: What does the state do with the pathetic users?

The answer? Not much.

Donald's point - and it's a valid one - is that his department shouldn't become a warehouse for addicted offenders.

Speight agrees.

"I am the mother of a 20-year-old son who is addicted to methamphetamine," she wrote in her letter. "Three years ago, he was a decorated high school football player who enjoyed playing the drums and guitar and being active in his church youth group. My son had been accepted to college in the fall of 2005 but never made it."

Instead, she wrote, he and his "friends" started using marijuana and then meth. She said he was arrested on a drug possession charge and attended a 30-day, inpatient treatment drug program in Jacksonville - a program for which the family shelled out $15,000.

It didn't work.

She said her son was later arrested in Alabama on a meth possession charge at about the same time he was sentenced in Georgia on the first possession charge. He was placed in a drug court program and under the supervision of a probation officer, but skipped after he tested positive on a drug test. Speight said she and her husband convinced him to turn himself in at the county jail, which he did.

The family hoped he would be sent to the Bainbridge Center, a 192-bed facility that the corrections system runs in the far southwestern corner of the state. It was opened in 2002 as Georgia's first probation residential substance abuse treatment program. It has functioned on the sound fiscal theory that for every dollar spent on drug treatment for offenders, six dollars are saved in future incarceration costs.

Her son never made it. Instead, Speight said, the paperwork got fouled up by probation officials and he was sent to a "straight" probation detention center where he will receive low-level drug treatment for a severe drug addiction. And she's worried.

"He will come out of this center clean because he hasn't had the drug, but being clean doesn't address the psychological and physical dependencies to the drug or the behavioral changes that will be required to address the addiction," she wrote.

Chatham County has a drug court for nonviolent offenders, and it seems to be getting results. The community also makes drug treatment available to low-income residents through the Savannah Area Behavioral Health Collaborative, which has a center tucked away on a side street in Garden City.

But is it enough? If you ask people who deal with addicts on a regular basis (homeless shelter workers, police officers, health-care workers), the answer is "no."

Georgia could do more by allowing some public funds to flow to faith-based programs that have a track record of success in getting people to kick their drug habits, such as the Salvation Army (full disclosure: I'm on the Salvation Army's local advisory board).

Until the state puts more resources on the demand side of meth, expect the number of faces of meth to grow. If you think they're ugly now, prepared to get really disgusted later.

Tom Barton is the editorial page editor of the Savannah Morning News. His e-mail address is tom.barton@savannahnow.com.